The Best Stylus for Your iPad or Other Touchscreen Device

After testing 18 styluses in five categories for over 20 hours to find the best touchscreen stylus for sketching, writing, and navigation, we think the Adonit Mark is the one most people should buy, thanks to its unmatched combination of accuracy, comfort, and price.

Last Updated:
11 months ago

We’ve tested the latest stylus models and overhauled this guide. Our new top pick, the Adonit Mark, sometimes costs less than a movie ticket but bests models several times its price. If you’re serious about drawing, writing, or note taking and have an iPad Pro, Apple’s Pencil is worth its premium price. We also still love Studio Neat’s Cosmonaut, especially for kids and accessibility.

Two years ago: We’ve updated this piece to address the Apple Pencil. Based on the reviews of a number of respected tech publications, and our initial hands-on experience, we feel confident in saying that it’s the best iPad stylus available. However, it’s not our top pick for most people, because it’s currently limited to use with only the iPad Pro.

Two years ago:
We’ve been using Adonit’s Jot Pro over the last six months since we made it our pick and continue to be impressed by its performance. No other stylus offers the same level of accuracy, especially not at the affordable price. The hardware has continued to hold up since our initial review. In September, Apple announced the Apple Pencil ($100), a stylus that works exclusively with its new iPad Pro. The Apple Pencil supports pressure sensitivity and recognizes the angle at which it’s being held, among a number of other interactions between the hardware and iOS. It charges through a Lightning plug, meaning it can be plugged into the iPad Pro’s port when it’s out of juice. Because the Apple Pencil only works with one version of the iPad, it likely won’t end up being a top pick, but we’ll still be testing it when it’s available in November.

Two years ago: Apple announced the Apple Pencil ($100), a stylus that works exclusively with its new iPad Pro. The Apple Pencil supports pressure sensitivity and recognizes the angle at which it’s being held, among a number of other interactions between the hardware and iOS. It charges through a Lightning plug, meaning it can be plugged into the iPad Pro’s port when it’s out of juice. Because the Apple Pencil only works with one version of the iPad, it likely won’t end up being a top pick, but we’ll still be testing it when it’s available in November.

Two years ago:
We’ve tested two new styluses: Lynktec's Apex Fine Point Stylus ($60) and Adonit’s Jot Dash ($50). Both fall between standard mechanical styluses and Bluetooth equipped models in terms of features and functionality. While battery-powered, neither communicates with the iPad in any way other than with physical touch. We share more details in the Competition section below.

Two years ago: Sensu’s Artist Brush & Stylus is our new alternate pick for those who prefer styluses with rubber nibs. While it’s $10 more expensive than our overall top pick, Adonit’s Jot Pro, it writes surprisingly well and has a paintbrush end that’ll appeal to artists.

Two years ago:
We’re currently testing Sensu’s Artist Brush & Stylus, The Verge’s pick for best stylus. Unlike the Adonit Jot Pro, it has a more traditional rubber nib. At the other end of the pen you’ll find capacitive brush bristles, useful in art applications. We'll update this guide once we've had a chance to use it and compare it to our other picks.

The Adonit Mark’s triangular anodized-aluminum body fits in your hand as perfectly as a grade-school pencil, and it writes smoothly on the iPad’s screen without offering too much or too little resistance. As cartoonist and designer Rich Stevens explained after testing the Mark, “For the cost of a pizza, it’s definitely worth doing some drawing with it.” Both of our experts cited it as their must-have stylus after the Apple Pencil, our pick for iPad Pro owners.

A solid, durable choice, especially for anyone who wants a thicker stylus body or a great tool for kids or accessibility.

If you can’t find our main pick, you need a great option for kids, or you want a wider stylus body, we also highly recommend Studio Neat’s Cosmonaut: Its thick rubber body feels great in the hand whether you’re 6 or 60, and it offers surprisingly good precision for a large-tipped rubber stylus. Popular among Wirecutter staff, it’s also one of the most durable styluses we’ve ever tested.

If you have an iPad Pro and the money to spare, the Apple Pencil is a no-brainer. It’s the absolute best stylus available, though it’s not the cheapest.

If you own an iPad Pro, plan to do a lot of writing and drawing, and have the cash to spare, the Apple Pencil is the absolute best stylus in its class. It blows away its Bluetooth and non-Bluetooth competition alike, thanks to systemwide integration with the iPad Pro; it also offers low latency, excellent palm rejection, and flawless pressure sensitivity. Its main drawback is that it’s limited to use with the iPad Pro.

Why you should trust us

I’ve been writing about iPad styluses since the very first Ten One Pogo Stylus debuted in early 2010—between my previous gig at Macworld and my current position as managing editor at iMore, I’ve tested more than 75. If you’ve tried a stylus since 2010, there’s a good chance I’ve used or owned it.

For previous versions of this guide, we interviewed graphic designer Dan Bransfield, and designer Mike West helped us test styluses. For the most-recent update, I did speed, handwriting, and precision tests myself; I also interviewed pixel artist Rich Stevens and cartoonist Danielle Corsetto, who have decades of experience working in print and online, and had them personally test our top picks.

A stylus isn’t for everyone, of course. If you use an iPad largely for browsing the Web, watching video, or playing games, you’re likely better off manipulating the screen with your finger. But even if you’re just a casual iPad or iPhone user, a simple stylus might be in the cards for you this year: With new drawing-focused messaging features in iOS 10, and with most social applications incorporating some form of doodling, it’s becoming more and more useful to be able to draw coherently on glass.

If drawing is one of your uses for an iPad, you need a good stylus.

When it comes to taking notes, using a stylus to write is faster and easier for many people than tapping away at the iPad’s screen. And most people have been writing since they were young, so it’s hardly a surprise that some would rather write with a pen-type instrument than their index finger. (People who don’t enjoy handwriting have other options, such as a Bluetooth keyboard or iPad keyboard case). And with the right stylus, digital artists can enjoy an experience closer to that of a pencil on paper than they would get by simply using a finger on the tablet’s glass display.

Professional digital artists and avid note-takers have different needs than the average iPad user, so we picked a few different styluses with those groups of people in mind, as well as a model for children and people with accessibility issues.

That said, if you find yourself somewhere outside of those groups, you can still do quite a lot with our top overall pick: Both of the professional artists who tested the Adonit Mark praised that stylus, with Rich Stevens saying, “If I could only pick one of the styluses you had aside from the Apple Pencil, I’d pick that [one].”

How iPad styluses work

The iPad’s touchscreen is capacitive, which means that to register a touch, it looks for the kind of electrical signals present in your body. (This is why you can’t use ordinary gloves on an iPad, for instance.) A capacitive stylus has an electricity-conducting nib (tip) that simulates the charge your finger provides on the screen.

But the iPad doesn’t require only a capacitive touch—it also demands that touches be of a certain size. As such, most stylus nibs have to be big enough to fake a finger gesture—usually around 6 to 9 millimeters wide—or they have to fake it with electrical signals.1

The contenders.

Over the years, manufacturers have come up with many creative—and often strange—approaches to building effective styluses, but the most popular and widely used techniques fall into five categories.

Rubber nib ($): This inexpensive option is the original approach for capacitive styluses, designed to imitate a finger. Such nibs originally measured 8 to 9 mm because the first iPad simply wouldn’t recognize anything smaller, but they have since shrunk to 5 to 6 mm as displays have improved. A rubber nib provides more resistance against the screen than plastic or disc nibs, but the bigger nibs often obscure your starting point, leading to poor accuracy. They also occasionally tear with use, though most manufacturers offer replacements.

Mesh nib ($): These fabric-based nibs have been around almost as long as their rubber counterparts, and they offer slightly better resistance on the screen. Unfortunately, like rubber nibs, mesh nibs can be bulky and prone to tearing; you can also encounter slowdowns with that excess resistance.

“Other” nib ($$): This category is dominated by disc nibs, though we’ve also seen capacitive paintbrushes, wands, and more. This type gained popularity thanks to stylus maker Adonit, whose disc tips use a 6 mm clear disc with a metallic center point that gives you finger-size touch input while allowing you to see precisely where you’re drawing. Plastic-disc nibs can be a little finicky to draw with, however, due to their lack of resistance; some models also may drive you crazy with their click-click-clicks as you pick up and put down the stylus.

Active (powered) fine-tip nib ($$$): This stylus type offers a much thinner nib (1.9 mm on average), similar to the tip of a traditional pen. Since the iPad’s screen doesn’t normally recognize inputs this small, such a model uses an internal battery to supply an electric charge to the tip that lets the stylus fake the diameter necessary for an iPad screen to recognize (what it perceives to be) a fingertip. When the technology works correctly, the thin nib offers excellent accuracy and minimal resistance, but it can also produce imprecise lines—Ten One Design CEO Peter Skinner told us that “you may notice the line seems to be offset from the tip.” In addition, it may not work with every iPad, because different iPad models have used different screen technologies. Such styluses also draw a heavy amount of power: As Skinner told us, the “AAA-size battery usually only lasts about 10 hours before recharge or replacement.”

Bluetooth-powered nib ($$$$): Originally created to provide Wacom-tablet-style performance and features for artists, Bluetooth styluses include additional hardware for features such as pressure sensitivity, palm rejection, greater precision, and custom buttons. However, Bluetooth styluses are usually the most expensive kind, and because Apple doesn’t provide a way for third-party styluses to provide systemwide support, stylus makers must rely on app developers to add model-specific support within their apps—which means that these features work with only those apps. And because each app supports a particular Bluetooth stylus in its own way, you may find that the stylus works differently in each app, and some features may not be available at all in some apps.

The Apple Pencil doesn’t follow any of the rules prescribed for other stylus options, because it doesn’t have to—it’s made by the same company that makes the iPad. Apple has systemwide access to iOS, of course, so it has incorporated support for the Pencil everywhere, and the iPad recognizes the Pencil as a completely different input from a fingertip. This is why the Pencil’s palm rejection is so good: The Pencil isn’t faking a finger, so iOS can simply ignore all hand and finger input while the Pencil is within range of the screen.

Today, rubber and mesh nibs are the most popular and least expensive options. They offer the surface area and general resistance of a finger in a pen-style body. This design comes at the expense of visual precision, however—even the best 8 mm stylus will feel a bit more clumsy than a precise pen nib.

How we picked and tested

An Amazon search for “iPad stylus” produces an overwhelming list of results. We narrowed our search by picking three to five top styluses from each of the five stylus categories described above, based on popularity, outside recommendations, our own stylus experience, and comparison testing. That gave us 18 models (including Apple’s Pencil) for our first round of hands-on tests. We’d tested some of these models multiple times previously; others were brand-new additions to the field.

We put that initial group through three rounds of tests on the three most recent iPad models: an iPad Air 2, a 9.7-inch iPad Pro, and a 12.9-inch iPad Pro. (Though we didn’t test with non-Apple screens, all the styluses but the Apple Pencil and Adonit Pixel should work just fine with the capacitive screen on any phone, phablet, tablet, or touchscreen laptop.) As for the app, we used Apple’s Notes, which provides a good baseline for drawing features without too much overprocessing, along with the Paper app for precision and balance tests.

We designed our initial tests to evaluate the four most important characteristics of a great stylus: comfort, resistance, balance, and precision. Though we’ve presented our results grouped by nib style, we tested all of the styluses in random order to prevent acclimation bias.

Comfort: It’s difficult to recommend a single stylus design and grip for everyone, because some people prefer a thicker body while others want rubberized grips or angled grip surfaces. However, if a stylus cramped a tester’s hand or dug into skin, we dropped it from consideration. Also, if we found it impossible to grip a stylus without dragging a hand on the screen or contorting fingers, we eliminated it. Beyond that, you want a tool that feels good when you write with it.

Resistance: A good stylus offers the right amount of resistance—the friction between the nib (drawing end) of the stylus and the iPad’s screen. If the nib is too slick, you won’t have the line control that you might get with a pen on a piece of paper. If it’s too sticky, you’ll find yourself making erroneous marks or getting sore hands from gripping the stylus more tightly to drag it across the screen.

The Adonit Mark’s balance point.

Balance and weight: A stylus’s weight should be distributed evenly along its body—a stylus with most of its weight at the nib and little at the other end (or vice versa) is uncomfortable to hold and difficult to control. This is especially true for styluses that don’t support palm rejection, which means you have to keep your hand upright over the pen. Weight is also important: A stylus that’s too heavy will cramp your hand over time, while one that’s too light will suffer from the same problems as a slicker pen nib—you won’t have the same control over your lines.

Precision: If you’re handwriting text, you want to be able to write consistently, without overlapping letters or inconsistent vertical spacing. If you’re drawing, you want to be able to ink over the same line precisely and repeatedly.

Our inking grid, made in Paper.

In our basic resistance test, our two testers (lefty me and a right-hander) wrote the phrase “The quick brown fox” in sentence case and all-caps. This test gave us a feel for how each of the nibs moved across the screen when trying to make quick, staccato lines. We also recorded the lag for each stylus when drawing a straight line and a curved line in Notes.

For our balance and precision tests, we made an inking grid in Paper that required the testers to trace a series of small triangles and a circle, and then to ink a pencil drawing. We performed the shapes test twice for each stylus, first tracing with Paper’s built-in zoom tools and then doing so again at native resolution.

Many of the styluses exhibited flaws and rough edges in these tests. To complete the circuit successfully, a stylus needed to trace solid lines, add dots (one of the most difficult tasks for a capacitive stylus), write, and add flair to a pencil sketch—all at different points of the canvas. It’s a test that few styluses perform perfectly.

Ink grids from our stylus contenders.

Finally, we used the Notes app and had our testers write the phrase “BIG FONT, SMALL FONT” at four different sizes—the first three at the iPad’s natural screen resolution, and then the tiniest version of the phrase at a 100 percent screen zoom. While we’d already gotten some writing samples at speed, this handwriting test was a chance to write with more care. Of the 18 styluses we tested in this initial group, only a few proved truly successful here. We were looking for handwriting that somewhat resembled a control test on actual paper, as well as readability at all four sizes, little to no traveling (letters or words moving up or down the screen as the sentence continued), and unwavering linework.

Based on these tests, we chose our semifinalists: From the rubber-nib category, we chose the Studio Neat Cosmonaut; for mesh-nib models, the Adonit Mark; for “other” styles, the Adonit Mini; and for powered styluses, the Lynktec Apex Fusion. Among Bluetooth styluses, we tested the Apple Pencil and the Adonit Pixel, assessing both of them as alternatives on an iPad Pro and as potential Bluetooth options for people with standard iPads.

We tested these six styluses with our illustration and cartooning experts. Diesel Sweeties creator Rich Stevens has been drawing and illustrating digitally for decades. Girls With Slingshots creator Danielle Corsetto is almost Stevens’s opposite: Though she’s famous for her recently completed webcomic, Corsetto created it largely using ink pens and physical paper, turning to digital tools primarily for cleanup. Each panelist spent a few hours using the semifinalists on a 9.7-inch iPad Pro and a 12.9-inch iPad Pro, drawing in Notes, Paper, Procreate, and GoodNotes. These tests weren’t nearly as structured as our first-round tests; instead, both artists experimented with the tools while engaged in their regular workflows.

Our pick

Sleek, comfortable, well-performing, and affordable, the Mark is one of the best iPad styluses we’ve ever used. (And we’ve used a lot.)

The best stylus for most people and most uses is the Adonit Mark. It feels like a high-quality pen in your hand, with an anodized finish you can’t help but want to touch. Its weight is evenly distributed across its body, allowing you to hold it close to the nib or near the other end and still have control. The Mark’s mesh nib is thicker, more durable, and smoother to write with than the competition. And perhaps best of all, this model is one of the most affordable styluses out there.

Don’t get us wrong: The Mark doesn’t beat the Apple Pencil—no stylus we tested does. But if you don’t have the money for a $100 stylus or you don’t have an iPad Pro, the Mark is the next best thing.

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The Adonit Mark feels great in the hand, and it writes and draws well.

Adonit has long been hailed in the iPad-stylus universe for great designs that feel good in the hand, and the Mark is no exception. It doesn’t have the same intricate bodywork as Adonit’s disc-nib options; rather, the curved, triangular design brings to mind grade-school pencils or charcoal sticks, with slanted sides that converge into a cone nose that cradles a 6 mm mesh nib. This cone-shaped nose will be welcome to anyone who uses their fingers close to the nib when writing or drawing.

The balance of this stylus is impeccable, centered slightly behind the midpoint of the body, and it feels great for writing and drawing whether you like to grip it at the nib, middle, or end. The Mark’s matte-black (or silver) anodized-aluminum finish provides a satisfying grip, and the coating is enjoyable to touch. If you like fidgeting with your writing implement, you’ll quite enjoy spinning the Mark around in your hand.

The Mark really proved itself during our speed and precision tests. While writing or tracing, you can hold the Mark in just about any position and still get good grip and control—and you can easily avoid accidentally rubbing your palm against the screen. This is one of the reasons why the results of the Mark’s handwriting tests looked so natural, even at multiple sizes, and why the shape tracings were so accurate. I can count on one hand the number of styluses I’ve tested over my career with balance like this, and only two others still in production (the Cosmonaut and the Apple Pencil).

The Adonit Mark’s inking grid.

Of course, the best balance in the world isn’t worth much if a stylus doesn’t perform well or has poor resistance against glass. Going into our tests, I assumed the Mark would fall flat in that regard: For years, every mesh stylus I reviewed ended up either too squishy or prone to tearing, or it felt plain wrong against the glass screen. As The Wirecutter’s Nick Guy put it in an earlier version of this guide, “While fabric nibs may glide more smoothly across a glass screen, we found many of the nibs to be too soft, making them feel sloppy and imprecise.”

However, the Mark offers a slightly different mesh-nib experience than previous styluses I’ve used. The nib is clearly thicker and reinforced; though it does bubble if you press on it, its stiffness reminds me more of rubber than pure mesh.

Because of the stylus’s nib shape, it’s also very friendly for people who like to write or sketch at an angle. The metal holding the nib balances out the bubbling issue, so it doesn’t feel as if the nib is collapsing when you angle the stylus. On the screen, the nib is smooth, but never in a runaway-train fashion—between the body’s balance and the slight resistance the nib offers, you’re in control of your lines no matter where you grip the tool.

The Mark has about average lag time for a traditional capacitive stylus.

After six weeks of testing, the Mark has made me somewhat of a mesh-nib stylus convert—at least for this mesh nib.

After six weeks of testing, the Mark has made me a mesh-nib stylus convert—at least for this mesh nib.

But here’s what shocks me about the Mark: It’s inexpensive. At about $15 at the time of this writing, it’s cheaper than every other stylus we tested, and it’s the least expensive stylus pick we’ve ever recommended. At the same time, the Mark doesn’t feel cheap: One of our illustration experts, Rich Stevens, described its build quality as “feeling like you were getting $50 of stylus.” (He pointed out that by comparison the $60 Lynktec Apex Fusion “also felt like you were getting $50 of stylus.”) If someone had asked me to take a blind guess as to the Mark’s cost, I would have easily pegged it at double or triple its actual price.

Rich Stevens and Danielle Corsetto are professionals in their field, and they both selected the Mark as their runner-up pick to the Apple Pencil, and the top choice for average users. “For the cost of a pizza?” Stevens said. “It’s definitely worth doing some drawing with it.”

In build, weight, and nib quality, the Adonit Mark is a phenomenal stylus for its price. “If you find you’re hitting [the Mark’s] limits, then it may be worth spending more on the Pencil,” said Stevens. It’ll never beat an Apple Pencil for people who want more precision and pressure sensitivity, but that’s okay. The Pencil is a $100 investment on top of a $600 (or much more expensive) iPad Pro, and you shouldn’t have to drop $700 to do some casual writing or drawing.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

After six weeks of testing and general use, our Adonit Mark’s black anodized-aluminum coating, while beautiful, already has a few surface scratches. They don’t detract in any way from the stylus’s effectiveness, but if you like your gadgets pristine, you might want to skip the black coating. (You’ll likely notice scratches less on the silver version.)

We also have some long-term concerns about the Mark’s mesh nib, based on past experience with other mesh nibs. As Nick Guy pointed out in the previous version of this guide, “We also don’t think fabric and mesh nibs are as durable as plastic and rubber nibs. Over just a few weeks of testing, we noticed that the fabric nibs on some of our styluses were starting to fray.” And Wirecutter senior associate editor Michael Zhao has found in the past that “skin oil, which you’ll find on any tablet screen, gets lodged in the mesh, impacting performance over time and making the stylus less reliable.”

Though the nib on our Adonit Mark currently shows no signs of fraying or tearing, we wonder if it may be an issue down the line. That said, the Mark’s nib is replaceable, and while Adonit doesn’t currently sell replacement Mark nibs, the company says you can request them through customer service.

Runner-up: For kids and accessibility

If the Adonit Mark is sold out or you don’t enjoy mesh-nib styluses, you can’t go wrong with the Studio Neat Cosmonaut.

A solid, durable choice, especially for anyone who wants a thicker stylus body or a great tool for kids or accessibility.

The Studio Neat Cosmonaut looks very different from most of the contenders in the stylus field—both its body and its nib are larger than those of every other modern stylus option we’ve seen. But it’s this bigger size that makes it a perfect choice for kids, people who have trouble gripping smaller pens, and anyone who wants the equivalent of a dry-erase marker in their iPad arsenal.

The Cosmonaut’s rubber-coated aluminum body is sturdy and balanced; it feels great in the hand of a child, adult, or senior. I’ve owned a Cosmonaut as part of my stylus collection since its release back in 2011; five years and many tests and real-world sketching sessions later, it still looks virtually new. It’s the only rubber-nib stylus I’ve used that I haven’t torn through, in part because of how closely the tip’s rubber adheres to the stylus’s inner nose cone.

Rich Stevens called it “the world’s best Sharpie stylus” when he first saw it, and he said he would absolutely buy one and keep it in his (often chaotic) shipping office. “All the other styluses try to look like pens. This one is instantly recognizable in a pile.”

When you’re drawing and writing with it, the Sharpie analogy is apt: It’s a big tool, and while its balance and resistance allow you to do excellent line work, you have to trust in the Cosmonaut’s nib precision—the stylus’s chunky body often blocks your view of the area you’re working on. For zoomed-in illustrations, loose sketching, or big writing, however, the Cosmonaut is a delight to work with.

Like the Mark, the Cosmonaut lags a bit, and its line isn’t always directly in the center of its nib.

The Cosmonaut’s sturdy build, thick profile, and replaceable nib also make it a nice option for younger kids—it reminds us of thick Crayola crayons. We’re not alone here, as many schools have chosen the Cosmonaut; the district for one Wirecutter editor’s kids, for example, has purchased Cosmonauts for every classroom.

Wirecutter senior associate editor Michael Zhao told us, “I used the Cosmonaut as my primary stylus for a couple months in college because I got sick of my backpack chewing up the tips of nib styluses. It’s super-tough and has astoundingly good line accuracy for the size. It’s like writing with a whiteboard marker, which is good because the iPad screen feels like a whiteboard. The only problem is that it weighs a ton. Solid aluminum is not as light as you’d think. I would find that after taking notes for an hour-long lecture, my hand would feel a little tired.”

The Cosmonaut can get heavy during lengthy drawing sessions, and at around $25 at this writing, it’s more expensive than the Mark. But if you want a solid stylus with a unique profile and excellent durability, you can’t go wrong with it.

If you have an iPad Pro and the money to spare, the Apple Pencil is a no-brainer. It’s the absolute best stylus available, though it’s not the cheapest.

If you’re a professional illustrator, calligrapher, or artist, or if you need impeccable handwriting and annotation on glass, you need the Apple Pencil. If you’re an intermediate artist taking the next step, you need the Apple Pencil. And if you like using a stylus to navigate your tablet, you’ll love the Apple Pencil. The big caveat is that the Pencil currently works only with the iPad Pro models.

The author, with an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil.

As someone who has drawn digitally on paper, Wacom tablets, a Microsoft Surface, iPads, and everything in between, I have to say that the Apple Pencil is the best digital stylus I have ever used, and the one I’ve wanted for years. It’s well-balanced, it offers phenomenal pressure sensitivity and effective palm rejection, and it has next to no lag in optimized apps and minimal lag in others—and even there, less lag than with any other stylus we’ve tested. It’s also the stylus that convinced our illustration expert, Danielle Corsetto, to purchase an iPad Pro after our testing sessions: As she writes on her Patreon blog, “I’m already drawing way more than usual, because I can draw at any angle, in any lighting situation, and I can use a tool that appears to look like graphite, but won’t smudge in my sketchbook (which is the only reason I don’t draw with pencil as often as I’d like to).”

As with many Apple products, the Pencil’s greatest strength is in the company’s hardware/software integration. Because Apple makes the Pencil, as well as the iPad, iOS, and software kits for developers, the Pencil can take advantage of special features (such as side-touch shading, thanks to data gathered from the Pencil’s tilt) that styluses from other makers simply cannot. iOS also identifies the Pencil as an entirely separate tool from a finger, which explains how it achieves such perfect palm rejection: The OS can actually differentiate between the Pencil stylus and your hand.

The Pencil is designed with real-world drafting pencils in mind; its length is almost identical to that of an HB art pencil, lack of eraser and all. It’s balanced just as nicely, too, allowing you to hold it wherever it feels natural or comfortable.

Thanks to integration with iOS, in apps that have been updated to support the Pencil, you see little if any lag between your Pencil nib and the resulting line. In Notes, this effect feels especially eerie—the app even tosses off tiny graphite fleck indents as you press harder on the screen. If you’re doing a bunch of high-speed zigzags and circles, you might catch glimpses of a trailing line (as shown in the GIF below), but for most tasks you may never notice a delay between your Pencil nib and your screen.

Pressure sensitivity for art and writing is still a bit of a mixed bag with the Pencil, depending on the app, as developers incorporate the feature differently. In the best apps, using a Pencil feels nigh identical to drawing on real paper. And unlike third-party Bluetooth styluses, which have pressure sensitivity only in apps that explicitly support each stylus, the Pencil still offers serviceable pressure sensitivity in older or unsupported programs.

During our tests, Corsetto described drawing with the Pencil in Paper, Procreate, and the stock Notes app as very natural, and she deemed it the closest to a real pencil she had experienced working digitally. In contrast, she wrote off the Adonit Pixel—our third-party Bluetooth semifinalist—as “like drawing with a much harder lead pencil” in Procreate; whereas the Pencil produced easy lines that she could vary with pressure, the Pixel required very heavy presses to make any sort of line at all.

Danielle Corsetto’s initial Apple Pencil test, in Paper.

When it comes to writing, the Pencil is no slouch, either: If you plan to write a lot on the iPad or you frequently annotate documents, it’s the only stylus we’ve found that can legibly and reliably write a word at about 10-point size. This means that you can take notes on a full-size document or ebook, even on a 9.7-inch iPad Pro, and not have to zoom your screen (or write in large print).

The Pencil is great for annotation, especially when you’re writing small.

The Pencil may also benefit people who prefer something other than a finger to interact with the iPad’s screen. We spoke with CGP Grey, co-host of the Hello Internet podcast, who has dealt with repetitive strain injury for years. Previous to the iPad, he “found that nothing worked as well for managing that as Wacom pen tablets.” After the iPad Pro was released, Grey found himself moving most of his work to iOS. However, Grey told us, “using the iPad with my hands held like I’m fingerpainting isn’t good for them. It causes strain if I’m working on the tablet all day.” Instead, he uses the Apple Pencil for most of his interactions with iOS, including editing scripts of his videos. “Being able to use the pen to navigate the iOS interface is a huge deal for me.”

On the other hand, critics have dinged the Pencil for the lack of a clip and a too-smooth body, and we agree on both counts. You can address both issues with relatively little fuss: Pick up a $2 Micron pen and steal its clip, buy a $5 clip that fits, or buy some gaffer’s tape or a custom skin to wrap around the Pencil body to give it more friction. But these are hack-fixes, to be sure.

The Pencil’s nib is also not as resistive or soft as it could be. Plastic nibs are usually slippery against glass and tend to make a tiny “tap-tap-tap” sound, and the Pencil is no different. Most high-end styluses—Wacom pens included—are similar in that respect, and the Pencil’s plastic nib doesn’t dramatically worsen the experience of working with the tool. That said, a Pencil with a rubber- or mesh-coated nib would be nice to see.

The Pencil also has a somewhat odd charging arrangement: The tool has a Lightning-connector plug hidden under a magnetic cap at the “eraser” end, and you plug the Pencil into an iPad’s Lightning-connector port to charge the stylus. (This is also how you pair the Pencil with the iPad in the first place.) It looks weird, and it seems as if a bump might break the connector off. Blogger Zach Straley discovered soon after the Pencil’s release that it can stand a surprising amount of abuse—Apple has clearly designed the rear of the tool to absorb force applied to the connector if it’s jostled. If you really want to break your Pencil, you can—but you shouldn’t break your iPad in the process.

On the other hand, as strange as it looks to have a stylus sticking out from the bottom of your iPad, the convenience factor of being able to add roughly 20 percent of the Pencil’s battery life in five minutes is great. Other powered styluses require either a separate power brick or a USB cable (and, of course, a USB power source). You can charge the Pencil anytime, anywhere, without having to remember any other accessories.

When the Omni and Dash 2 are officially released, we’ll take a look at them and add them to this guide. I do have a sample of the Snap, a 1.9 mm fine-line stylus that works similarly to the original Adonit Dash, save for a flatter magnetic body. It’s primarily designed for use with a smartphone, and it even comes with a magnetic adhesive for your phone so that you can store the Snap on the rear side of your device. It’s a decent version of a fine-line stylus, but as its primary focus is mobile phones, I elected not to put it through the same tests as our iPad contenders.

The competition

For the latest update to this guide, we surveyed the stylus field and picked 18 styluses to actively test. You can see the grouped results of our handwriting, speed, and trace tests in the images above, but here’s a bit more on why previous winners and contenders didn’t pass muster in 2016.

The Adonit Mini was a runner-up pick in an earlier version of this guide, and it’s still a solid option. It costs a bit less than the Studio Neat Cosmonaut and offers the same kind of top-tier build quality as the Adonit Mark. Adonit makes some compromises with the Mini, however. The most obvious is size: The Mini measures 3.9 inches with the cap on and 4.5 inches with the cap stored at the other end during use, with a slightly smaller diameter of just over 0.3 inch. It also weighs just 13 grams. A little bit of heft goes a long way when it comes to comfort and control, and the Mark simply feels more comfortable and easier to use than the Mini. The Mini also lacks the Mark’s textured grip.

Working with disc-style nibs also brings its own set of pros and cons: With a plastic tip, you get the appearance of greater accuracy, but as with thin-nib styluses, that may not always be the case, especially when you’re writing or drawing quickly. Disc nibs also lack the “give” of a soft tip and offer less resistance against the screen than rubber or mesh, and as a result you must position the nib at the proper angle to write or draw correctly.

The clack-clack-clack of the tip can also be annoying at times, and the press-lift-press when you’re writing block letters can often result in letters ending up too close together. Rich Stevens found the Mini “fussy” for any sort of drawing and noted that “it felt like something you’d want for Excel [and tapping cells], but not to draw.”

Our former top pick, the Adonit Pro, remains a stylus worthy of attention—it’s well-built, and it has many of the same features as its sibling, the Mini. But ultimately, as nice as the apparent precision of the disc seems to be, it’s not all that much more accurate, especially when you’re drawing or writing quickly or in apps with any noticeable lag. Like the Mini, the Pro also suffers from a lack of resistance, especially when you’re writing quickly.

Adonit’s other disc-nib model, the Switch, cleverly incorporates a real pen into the tool’s body: Twist the stylus, and an ink tip slides out of the bottom. But the design doesn’t thrill me, and the extra weight doesn’t do the stylus any balance favors in a comparison lineup.

Rounding out the unusual-nib category are those styluses fashioned after a watercolor brush, such as the Sensu Solo. The Sensu (which also comes in a combination rubber-nib-and-paintbrush version) suffers from the way the iPad senses touches. It’s awfully fun to use the Sensu to “paint” after inking with the Pencil, but unlike with a real paintbrush, you can’t change your brush stroke based on how much of the brush you apply to the canvas—it’s limited to the preset size you chose in your app (or one that the app chose for you). If you have the money for a secondary stylus that feels fun, we’d recommend a Sensu, but it shouldn’t be any artist’s primary pick.

The Nomad Compose is another brush-style model, and it shares with the Sensu Solo the disadvantage of the iPad not really being able to detect brush size. Between the two, we preferred the Sensu Solo’s performance.

Longtime tablet leader Wacom has been making rubber and Bluetooth styluses for the iPad for a few years, but 2016 saw the company change to mesh nibs for its standout products, the Bamboo Solo and Bamboo Duo (the latter of which includes a traditional pen nib in addition to a digital stylus tip). Unfortunately, not only do the mesh nibs feel flimsy and have way too much squish when you draw on the screen, but the weight balance of both styluses has changed, too, which left us thoroughly unimpressed.

We had similar balance and nib issues with Ten One Design’s Pogo Stylus: While slightly heavier and better-weighted in the hand than the Bamboo Solo, the Pogo Stylus still feels too flimsy for writing on iPad-size screens. (This criticism is perhaps not lost on Ten One, which is marketing this iteration of its long-running stylus primarily for use with the iPhone.)

For iPad owners, Ten One instead offers the Pogo Connect 2, the second iteration of the company’s Bluetooth stylus. The Pogo Connect was one of the first pressure-sensitive styluses available, and the second generation supports drawing in multiple apps along with a bevy of different tips to customize your drawing experience. But it’s been almost two years since the Connect 2 was released, and as such, its official support extends only to iPads of a similar age: The iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3 are as fancy as this stylus gets. It’s an all-around solid Bluetooth stylus for those tablet generations, but newer offerings from other companies, such as Adonit’s Pixel, do the job better at a lower price—or in the case of the Pencil, they blow the Connect 2 away in pressure sensitivity, palm rejection, and control.

The same goes for Wacom’s Bamboo Fineline 2: While we quite liked the original Bamboo Fineline, the Fineline 2’s build quality isn’t as good, and it’s limited to use with the iPad Air 2 or earlier iPad models.

FiftyThree’s Pencil—the “original” Pencil stylus—was novel in its addition of an eraser nib to the end of the pen and its software implementation with Paper, but this Bluetooth stylus simply doesn’t offer as much functionality as other connected tools, nor does it provide the comfort that more inexpensive pens enjoy. (It also suffers from a rubber nib that wears quickly; while you can get replacements from Amazon, this increases the total cost of ownership.)

Applydea’s Maglus has long been loved by users, and on paper it has a lot to offer: removable magnetic tips, a magnetic grip that lets the stylus cling to the side of the iPad, and a well-balanced, machined aluminum body. But in practice, we found the Maglus to be somewhere in the middle of the pack. While the ergonomic grip suits bigger hands, it can feel a little too heavy in smaller ones. The rubber and optional mesh nibs are also some of the larger options available at 8 mm wide, but they don’t provide increased control; instead, in our no-zoom precision testing the Maglus had one of the sloppiest entries, and it wrote over previous letters in our small-size writing tests.

The Apex Fusion is Lynktec’s latest tool. The Fusion offers a 1.9 mm mesh nib, an auto-off battery, and easy charging via a Micro-USB port on its body, and its aluminum body is anodized in the same fashionable colors as 2016’s iPad line. The Apex Fusion is a great precision stylus in apps like Notes, but it suffers from greater lag than basic capacitive styluses do.

It also runs into major trouble with programs that use custom drawing algorithms or that haven’t optimized their code to work with powered styluses. Our drawing tests in Paper highlighted this behavior: When we drew or wrote slowly with the Apex Fusion, the app would lose the nib’s location and generate wavy, jagged patterns, whereas with other stylus models the app would produce smooth lines.

The Dash is Adonit’s powered, non-Bluetooth stylus, and it’s an excellent pocket-sized option with a 1.9 mm nib. But it suffers from the same lag and tracking issues as the Apex Fusion (and all other battery-powered, thin-nib styluses), and its nib isn’t quite as nice as the Apex Fusion’s.

On that front, Just Mobile’s AluPen Digital was the worst of the powered models: In almost every app we tested—including Notes, Paper, GoodNotes, and Procreate—its lines frequently went jagged or disappeared altogether.

Adonit’s Bluetooth option, the Pixel, is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s one of the few Bluetooth styluses that support Apple’s iPad Pro, but it officially works with only the 12.9-inch version; Adonit told us that support for the 9.7-inch iPad Pro will be coming in a software update. In our tests, the Pixel worked well—without pressure sensitivity—on both Pro models in most of the major apps, but getting its bonus features to work on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro was a pain. Several of the Pixel’s supported apps, including Procreate, identified it as an “unrecognized” stylus and refused to enable palm rejection. The plastic nib also required much more pressure against the screen than the Pencil to create variable lines. If you truly need a pressure-sensitive option and have an iPad Pro, you’d be better off saving your $80 toward an Apple Pencil; if you just want a good fine-line stylus, Adonit’s $40 Dash is a much less expensive option. Older iPads are where the Pixel shines: While it still runs into occasional pressure-sensitivity issues in compatible apps, it remains the best pick for Air 2 users who can’t yet upgrade to an iPad Pro and a Pencil.

Our tests focused on the top contenders in each category (mesh, rubber, alternative, powered, and Bluetooth), so we didn’t test all of our previous runners-up for this latest update. We excluded some models based on prior personal testing experience, advice from previous writers and testers who worked on this guide, or discontinuation of older designs.

Footnotes:

1. One other potential issue: Sometimes the capacitive-signal requirements change as Apple tweaks the technology in its iPad displays. As Ten One Design CEO Peter Skinner explained to us, “Many iPad models use slightly different electrical signals to sense fingers … it’s why some [6 mm or smaller-nib] styli that worked on an iPad Air wouldn’t work with iPad Air 2. [There’s] no guarantee [current styluses will] work on a future model.” Jump back.

Serenity Caldwell writes, talks about, and tinkers with all things Apple as the managing editor of iMore. In her spare time, she obsesses over digital drawing and photography, and in her secret superhero life she plays roller derby and blogs about it.

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